The Nature of Play in Le avventure di Pinocchio

Based on ecocritical theory, theories about ‘The Strange Child’, and theories about play and criteria of play as found in Peter Smith’s Children and Play (2009), this article aims to examine the nature of play in various illustrations of Pinocchio’s sojourn in The Land of Toys. The article also discusses the representations of play in light of the ambiguous message in the book about the necessity of freedom and, at the same time, the necessity of formation. Since physically active play seems to be the most common kind of game in The Land of Toys, the text, but not always the illustrations, seems to perceive physically active play as a hindrance to the formation process where a physical, controlled, and subordinated body is a basic condition.

Pinocchio’s Return: New Developments of a Mythopoesis in Italian Children’s Literature

This contribution proposes a critical analysis focused on a selection of Italian contemporary children’s books conceived as reinterpretations of Carlo Collodi’s masterpiece Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883). Following a long-lasting tradition of works in which Pinocchio’s adventures are adapted, resumed, or actualised, a few books published in the early 21st century stand out because of their ability to establish a deeper dialogue with the original novel, its meanings, and its aspects of interest nowadays. The first work examined, Fabian Negrin’s picture book titled Occhiopin. Nel paese dei bei occhi (2006), is an upside-down reinterpretation of Pinocchio’s story that takes place in a contemporary setting. The second work is a novel by Silvano Agosti, Il ritorno di Pinocchio (2010), which tells the story of a night-time encounter between a little girl and a boy who claims to be Collodi’s most famous character. The third work, Alessandro Sanna’s silent book titled Pinocchio prima di Pinocchio (2015), retells the puppet’s fantastic birth through a series of evocative pictures that expresses the power of nature from a universal point of view. After the individual analyses of the three books, the final section aims to trace some peculiar similarities between them, firstly focusing on the social issues and childhood values identified in Negrin’s and Agosti’s works, and finally, through a comparison of their endings with Sanna’s work, discussing their common symbolic point of view.

Italian Literature in Polish Schools: Pinocchio forever?

This article presents aspects of the way Pinocchio is known and understood in Poland, based on the availability and use of Italian literature in primary and secondary schools in that country since the Second World War. It focuses on the paratexts and contexts of the last two translations of Collodi’s masterpiece, particularly the translation by Jarosław Mikołajewski with illustrations by Roberto Innocenti, published in 2011.